Chelsea Green Blog
Farming & Homesteading
How to Pick Land: Good Enough is Perfect
There is a lot to consider when getting ready to pick land for farming— location, size, price, soil quality, water access, etc. When considering such factors, it is important to look beyond what a plot of land has at face value and consider its potential. Land quality is not stagnant, but can be shaped over…
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The Buzz: Beekeeping for Beginners
Beekeeping has been on the rise in recent years, and backyard hives have become more and more popular. Ross Conrad knows a thing or two about beekeeping, and his book has become a must-read for enterprising apiculturalists who want to learn how to care for bees holistically and organically. The following is an excerpt from…
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How to Create A Rodent-Free Planting Bed
Are rodents like mice and squirrels ruining the vegetables and crops you’ve worked hard to cultivate? Fear not! Expert gardener Dani Baker has offered a few tips to help you keep a rodent-free planting bed this growing season. The following is an excerpt from The Home-Scale Forest Garden by Dani Baker. It has been adapted for the…
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Get Started With Tillage: Choosing the Right Crops
Interested in getting started with tillage? All you’ll need is a spot, some soil, and some crops to make your vision a reality. But deciding exactly which crops should make the cut might actually take more work than you think. When it comes to deciding on which crops to till, it’s important to keep in…
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Open-Source Agriculture: “Hacking” the Farming Industry
Whether we like it or not, technology is quickly evolving and continues to be an integral part of our everyday lives. This leaves us with a choice: we can either allow ourselves to be dominated by this new technology, or we can harness its potential and use it to understand and improve our shared environment.…
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The Mystery Behind Meat Labels: Got “American” Beef?
Where does the beef we consume actually come from? And why does it matter? When we purchase beef, we may not consider everything that took place before the package hit the grocery store shelf. However, where and how cattle are raised can have a big impact on the quality of meat and the overall well-being…
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Ditch the Pots, Use Soil Blocks!
What’s a cheaper, easier, and surprisingly more efficient way to start your seedlings? Soil blocks! If you’ve never used them before, read on to find out how soil blocks work, how you make them, and what advantages they offer over traditional pots and trays. The following is an excerpt from The New Organic Grower by…
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Open-Source Systems: How Communities Can Help Promote Regenerative Agriculture
The Great Regeneration, by farmer-technologist Dorn Cox and author-activist Courtney White, explores unique and groundbreaking research aimed at reclaiming the space where science & agriculture meet as a shared human endeavor. By employing the same tools used to visualize and identify the global instability in our climate and our communities, the authors identify ways to accelerate…
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How to Start Seedlings in a Cold Frame: Gardening Tips from Eliot Coleman
Are you ready to get a jump-start on the gardening season? With a cold frame, you can get started now. A cold frame harnesses the sun’s heat before it’s warm enough to let unprotected seedlings growing outside. Essentially, it consists of a garden bed surrounded by an angled frame and covered with a pane of…
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Chickpea Sprout Hummus: Breathe Life Back Into Winter
Just because the months are getting colder doesn’t mean you can’t still have homemade hummus with fresh chickpeas; you just have to get creative with it. This hummus recipe uses chickpea sprouts, which are growable indoors and during winter. The following is an excerpt from Wild Flavors: One Chef’s Transformative Year Cooking from Eva’s Farm by…
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Farming for the Long Haul: It Takes a Village
It’s almost impossible to achieve farming for the long haul without a group of caretakers behind the scenes, making sure everyone’s needs are met. For hundreds of years, women made up these “caring communities,” supporting families, making food, and bettering community life. Though the makeup of these caring communities has changed over the years, the…
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Survive the Winter Blues: Grow, Eat and Plan
There is no denying it: the days are short and unless you planned for a winter garden, fresh vegetables from your backyard have long passed. But don’t let the winter blues get you down. There are plenty of recipes to last you through the cold season and into the ‘hungry gap’. We’re sharing a few…
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The Scoop on Spoon Carving
There’s no better time than the present to pick up a new hobby! And with the new year just starting, sticking to a new hobby can be an easy and achievable resolution. One possible new hobby you could try out? Spoon carving. The following is an excerpt from Carving Out a Living on the Land…
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Maize vs. Graze: Is Corn Dangerous For Cattle?
One of the biggest misconceptions floating around is that vegetable production is a more environmentally friendly alternative to meat production. However, studies show that the practices used in conventional vegetable farming may be more destructive than those used to produce meat. Growing corn, specifically, can lead to many destructive outcomes; however, a large majority of our…
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Seeds of Hope: Striving For A Sustainable Future
Over the years, many of our world’s most flavorful vegetables have become extinct for a variety of reasons; however, these lost crops and their seeds may be the secret to gaining global food security and achieving a higher level of overall wellness. So how can we get them back? What can we do to ensure…
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Chelsea Green Staff Picks for Your 2023 Reading List
From the enlightening and thought-provoking to the quirky and fun, we, the Chelsea Green employees, have the perfect list to get you started on your next read! And if you’re looking for more, you can check out our full list of staff picks here! Mini-Forest Revolution We’ve long heard that we need to plant…
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Human and Animal Alliances: A Mutual Partnership
When humans and animals interact, both parties benefit in some way from the exchange. While individuals may receive resources and feel a sense of joy & purpose from interacting with wildlife, the animals receive care & companionship from the humans. These alliances, when properly nurtured, can work wonders for our world. In the excerpt below…
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The Power of Traditional Herding & Grazing: Bringing Back Balance
Hoofprints on the Land by Ilse Köhler-Rollefson, a fascinating and lyrical book exploring the deep and ancient working partnerships between people and animals, shows that herding cultures are not a thing of the past but a regenerative model for our future. The foreword below by Dr. Fred Provenza, author of Nourishment and professor emeritus of Behavioral Ecology,…
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5 Environmental Benefits of Regenerative Grazing
In Grass-Fed Beef for a Post-Pandemic World, Lynne Pledger and Ridge Shinn discuss how regenerative grazing can offer health benefits for consumers, livestock, and the environment alike. This practice has the power to not only improve our health and the broken food system, but can also provide a variety of environmental benefits as well. The following…
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Feeding the World: Why Regenerative Grazing Is So Important
How can we learn from our mistakes and pave a way for sustainable, nutritious, local meat? In Grass-Fed Beef for a Post-Pandemic World, Lynne Pledger and Ridge Shinn take readers on a journey through production agriculture to show how regenerative grazing can benefit our climate and environment. The foreword below by Gabe Brown, bestselling author of Dirt to Soil…
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How to Build a Wood-Fired Oven at Home
Do you have a love affair with wood-fired pizza? Can’t resist a fresh from the oven loaf of bread? Are always looking for another DIY project? If you said yes, then this one’s for you! Richard Miscovich, bread expert and wood-fired oven builder, offers a few useful tips and general masonry guidelines to help you…
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The Best Types of Apples for Cider in North America
If you’re a fan of cider, you know that the type of apple used can make or break the flavor. And with all the different brands of cider out there, many kinds of apples from across the world are being utilized to create it. In his new book Cider Planet, author and renowned cider maker…
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How to Grow and Store the 5 Crops You Need to Survive
In an age of erratic weather and instability, it’s increasingly important to develop a greater self-reliance when it comes to food. And because of this, more than ever before, farmers are developing new gardening techniques that help achieve a greater resilience. Longtime gardener and scientist Carol Deppe, in her book The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and…
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4 Dried Tomato Recipes to Enjoy the Harvest Year Round
Have an overabundance of tomatoes? No problem. Preserve your summer harvest and enjoy the taste of the season all year long with these dried tomato recipes! For more recipes using traditional preserving techniques like salt, oil, drying, cold storage, vinegar, and fermentation, read Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning. Tomatoes Dried Naturally Tomatoes Almond oil (or another…
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4 Ways to Preserve Your Green Bean Bounty
Harvest season is finally here! If you’re anything like us, you’ve got green beans up the wazoo around this time of year. If you’re looking for a new way to preserve your green bean bounty for the fall and winter months, these four salt-based techniques should help. Here’s to months of delicious green beans ahead!…
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